The Garret Tree
Friday, April 24, 2009
The Japanese waterboarding debate widens
The debate over Japanese waterboarding is growing.
Paul Begla, in the Huffington Post, writes Yes National Review, We did execute the Japanese for waterboarding.
Begala is responding to an assertion by Mark Hemingway of National Review Online that U.S. did not execute the Japanese.
The problem with that debate is that it is apparently based on only one case, that of Yukio Asano, and that debate is based only on the online summary of the trial. Apparently it's too much in this internet age to have a debate on the substance of a matter of national and international importance based on the facts or substantive research, just what you pick up on the web. (And these are older adults, so why are we boomers complaining about kids basing their school work on Wikipedia? We have here role models for Wiki-searching from both sides of the polarized American political spectrum.)
There is the usual American parochialism, that it only counts, apparently, if an American was waterboarded or if the Americans executed war criminals for waterboarding. To many Americans, and almost all American conservatives, not only on the Huffington Post or the National Review Online, but on other blogs, that the British tried the Japanese for waterboarding is of little or no importance.
That's why it's called International Humanitarian Law (A lot of the evidence against the Japanese for torture in the Double Tenth case, which was a British military tribunal, came from American war crimes investigators.)
Finally there's a double anonymous comment on the Huffington Post in response to Begala. From an anonymous poster calling himself The Golden Master, quoting an equally anonymous so-called close assosicate who apparently says:
Obviously whomever this person is has never actually checked the index to the published edition of the transcript of the hearing of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Far East, for the "water treatment" is easy to find.
I quoted from the trial in my original post
The online debate was triggered by this "discussion" on CNN's Anderson Cooper.
There is also Andrew Sullivan's response to Hemingway here and to Begala here.
Update:
There's a good summary (and much more intelligent debate) on Mahalo Answers.
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, torture,F Force, Prisoner of War,military tribunal, waterboarding, law, book, CNN, Huffington Post, National Review
11:30 PM posted by Robin Rowland
Permanent Link
Links to this post
Paul Begla, in the Huffington Post, writes Yes National Review, We did execute the Japanese for waterboarding.
Begala is responding to an assertion by Mark Hemingway of National Review Online that U.S. did not execute the Japanese.
The problem with that debate is that it is apparently based on only one case, that of Yukio Asano, and that debate is based only on the online summary of the trial. Apparently it's too much in this internet age to have a debate on the substance of a matter of national and international importance based on the facts or substantive research, just what you pick up on the web. (And these are older adults, so why are we boomers complaining about kids basing their school work on Wikipedia? We have here role models for Wiki-searching from both sides of the polarized American political spectrum.)
There is the usual American parochialism, that it only counts, apparently, if an American was waterboarded or if the Americans executed war criminals for waterboarding. To many Americans, and almost all American conservatives, not only on the Huffington Post or the National Review Online, but on other blogs, that the British tried the Japanese for waterboarding is of little or no importance.
That's why it's called International Humanitarian Law (A lot of the evidence against the Japanese for torture in the Double Tenth case, which was a British military tribunal, came from American war crimes investigators.)
Finally there's a double anonymous comment on the Huffington Post in response to Begala. From an anonymous poster calling himself The Golden Master, quoting an equally anonymous so-called close assosicate who apparently says:
In the first place, I had studied, written, and; 'published' on the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, but I've never come across information that the Japanese waterboarded their captives, even less that Japanese war criminals were executed for waterboarding. So, Paul Begala has no credibility unless he produces his source(s) for that assertion.
Obviously whomever this person is has never actually checked the index to the published edition of the transcript of the hearing of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Far East, for the "water treatment" is easy to find.
I quoted from the trial in my original post
This form of torture was not limited to Singapore. The judgment of the Tokyo war crimes trial said “the water treatment was commonly applied…there is evidence that this torture was used in the following places: (spelling in the original)
China, at Shanghai, Peiping and Nanking
French IndoChina, at Hanoi and Saigon
Malaya, a Singapore
Burma, at Kyaikto
Thailand, at Chumporn
Andaman Islands, at Port Blair
Borneo, at Jesselton
Sumatra, at Madan, Tadjong Keareng and Palembang
Java, at Batavia, Badung, Soerabaja and Buitonzorg
Celebes, at Makeskar
Portuguese Timor, at Orzu and Dilli
Philippines, at Manila, Nichols Field, Palo Beach and Dumquete
Formosa, at Camp Haito
Japan, at Tokyo"
The online debate was triggered by this "discussion" on CNN's Anderson Cooper.
There is also Andrew Sullivan's response to Hemingway here and to Begala here.
Update:
There's a good summary (and much more intelligent debate) on Mahalo Answers.
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, torture,F Force, Prisoner of War,military tribunal, waterboarding, law, book, CNN, Huffington Post, National Review
Labels: A River Kwai Story, Andrew Sullivan, CNN, F Force, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, Huffington Post, human rights, Japan, National Review, Singapore, Tokyo trial, torture, waterboarding, World War II
11:30 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Sunday, April 06, 2008
A River Kwai Story published, available online
A River Kwai Story: The Sonkrai Tribunal was officially published on April 4, 2008 by Allan and Uwin in Australia. The publisher is distributing the book in Australia, New Zealand and parts of the western Pacific. Allan and Unwin also has non-exclusive rights to distribute the book in Asia.
So far I haven't been able to sell rights in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.
No matter, in the age of the Internet, the book is available online almost everywhere! (See below)
A River Kwai Story is a project that has taken almost eight years, but I was planning it for almost a decade, if not more, before that.
My father was a prisoner on the railway of death and so I heard his stories at the breakfast table. He also bought any book he could on the railway, most of the POW memoirs that were published following the success of David Lean's movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.
I really began work in the summer of 2000, when I was admitted to the interdisciplinary masters program at York University in Toronto.
Although my father was part of the group known as "H Force," when I was reading the memoirs my father had bought, I had a gut feeling that "F Force," the events at Sonkrai, was the key to understanding what happened on the Railway of Death. My gut feeling was confirmed when, as part of the interdisciplinary program, I began studying international humanitarian law and found out that the story of F Force not only had some of the most fascinating characters of the Second World War, but was also a little known but key case in the concept of command responsiblity for war crimes.
As I entered the second year of the part time program in September 2001 (I worked for CBC throughout the process and I am still working for CBC News) the attacks on September 11, and the subsequent events in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq made the story all the more relevant. While the Bush administration was denying that there was a strong legal definition of what constituted "inhuman treatment" of detainees, it was clear that every post-war case in the Far East, including the cases tried by the United States, clearly defined "inhuman treatment."
After I graduated from the MA program in the fall of 2003, I turned turning the academic thesis into a book. I thought it would take a year. It took four. There were delays in getting additional material to flesh out the academic thesis, to write the book as world events kept me busy at my job and then there were some delays in the production process at the Australian publisher.
Now it's available for you to read:
International orders for A River Kwai Story The Sonkrai Tribunal
Updated August 2008
Outside of Australia and New Zealand, the best way to order this book is through a book store that resells through Amazon.com.
A River Kwai Story page on Amazon.com.
(Note this link does not operate from either Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk, if you want to order you must go through Amazon.com.)
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, Iraq,F Force, Prisoner of War,
military tribunal, law, book
11:39 AM posted by Robin Rowland
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A River Kwai Story: The Sonkrai Tribunal was officially published on April 4, 2008 by Allan and Uwin in Australia. The publisher is distributing the book in Australia, New Zealand and parts of the western Pacific. Allan and Unwin also has non-exclusive rights to distribute the book in Asia.So far I haven't been able to sell rights in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.
No matter, in the age of the Internet, the book is available online almost everywhere! (See below)
A River Kwai Story is a project that has taken almost eight years, but I was planning it for almost a decade, if not more, before that.
My father was a prisoner on the railway of death and so I heard his stories at the breakfast table. He also bought any book he could on the railway, most of the POW memoirs that were published following the success of David Lean's movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.
I really began work in the summer of 2000, when I was admitted to the interdisciplinary masters program at York University in Toronto.
Although my father was part of the group known as "H Force," when I was reading the memoirs my father had bought, I had a gut feeling that "F Force," the events at Sonkrai, was the key to understanding what happened on the Railway of Death. My gut feeling was confirmed when, as part of the interdisciplinary program, I began studying international humanitarian law and found out that the story of F Force not only had some of the most fascinating characters of the Second World War, but was also a little known but key case in the concept of command responsiblity for war crimes.
As I entered the second year of the part time program in September 2001 (I worked for CBC throughout the process and I am still working for CBC News) the attacks on September 11, and the subsequent events in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq made the story all the more relevant. While the Bush administration was denying that there was a strong legal definition of what constituted "inhuman treatment" of detainees, it was clear that every post-war case in the Far East, including the cases tried by the United States, clearly defined "inhuman treatment."
After I graduated from the MA program in the fall of 2003, I turned turning the academic thesis into a book. I thought it would take a year. It took four. There were delays in getting additional material to flesh out the academic thesis, to write the book as world events kept me busy at my job and then there were some delays in the production process at the Australian publisher.
Now it's available for you to read:
International orders for A River Kwai Story The Sonkrai Tribunal
Updated August 2008
Outside of Australia and New Zealand, the best way to order this book is through a book store that resells through Amazon.com.
A River Kwai Story page on Amazon.com.
(Note this link does not operate from either Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk, if you want to order you must go through Amazon.com.)
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, Iraq,F Force, Prisoner of War,
military tribunal, law, book
Labels: A River Kwai Story, Burma Thailand Railway, F Force, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, Singapore, war crime, World War II, writing
11:39 AM posted by Robin Rowland
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Sunday, March 09, 2008
John McCain on Japanese waterboarding
Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for president of the United States surprised me again tonight when he appeared on 60 Minutes and mentioned to interviewer Scott Pelley about how the Japanese used waterboarding during the Second World War.
In one way, I am not surprised, as the son of Second World War POW, abuse like that is of great interest to all who have that legacy and so it is no surprise that the Senator, who was, of course, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, would have a strong interest in the subject.
But is, as far as I know, the firs time since the Second World War, that an American politician of McCain's stature has brought up the subject of Japanese waterboarding. It is certainly the first time that a presidential candidate has discussed Japanese waterboarding on a major network news show like 60 Minutes.
Here is the key quote:
You can read the complete 60 Minutes interview here
Here is my account of the infamous Double Tenth waterboarding case in Singapore in 1943.
I first blogged about Waterboarding is a War Crime in November 2005.
Despite the claims of U.S. officials, waterboarding is not an effective interrogation technique.
You can read the entire blog entry but here is the bottom line summary. British and Australian commandos raided Singapore harbour and successfully blew up ships. The Japanese secret police believed it was civilian internees who committed the sabotage.
So the Japanese tortured their suspects, who under water boarding, and other tortures confessed to taking part in a commando raid they knew nothing about.
Related link: An account of the waterboarding of American POWs by the Japanese during the Second World can be found here from Georgtown University.
Watch the 60 Minutes interview with Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain:
Now that Senator McCain has raised the issue, and raised it as part of the campaign, I hope that more people will take a closer look at how the Japanese decided to ignore the Geneva Convention and how the Far East war crimes trials dealt with the issue.
For me this is probably the most interesting U.S. presidential campaign in my lifetime. All three candidates have admirable qualities. (John McCain has also got good poilcies on climate change)
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, John McCain,F Force, Prisoner of War,military tribunal, torture, law, book, waterboarding, water torture, 60 Minutes, CBS,POW
11:27 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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In one way, I am not surprised, as the son of Second World War POW, abuse like that is of great interest to all who have that legacy and so it is no surprise that the Senator, who was, of course, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, would have a strong interest in the subject.
But is, as far as I know, the firs time since the Second World War, that an American politician of McCain's stature has brought up the subject of Japanese waterboarding. It is certainly the first time that a presidential candidate has discussed Japanese waterboarding on a major network news show like 60 Minutes.
Here is the key quote:
Pelley asked him about American interrogation methods today. Asked if water boarding is torture, McCain said, "Sure. Yes. Without a doubt."
"So the United States has been torturing POWs?" Pelley asked.
"Yes. Scott, we prosecuted Japanese war criminals after World War II.
And one of the charges brought against them, for which they were convicted, was that they water-boarded Americans," McCain said.
You can read the complete 60 Minutes interview here
Here is my account of the infamous Double Tenth waterboarding case in Singapore in 1943.
I first blogged about Waterboarding is a War Crime in November 2005.
Despite the claims of U.S. officials, waterboarding is not an effective interrogation technique.
You can read the entire blog entry but here is the bottom line summary. British and Australian commandos raided Singapore harbour and successfully blew up ships. The Japanese secret police believed it was civilian internees who committed the sabotage.
So the Japanese tortured their suspects, who under water boarding, and other tortures confessed to taking part in a commando raid they knew nothing about.
Related link: An account of the waterboarding of American POWs by the Japanese during the Second World can be found here from Georgtown University.
Watch the 60 Minutes interview with Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain:
Now that Senator McCain has raised the issue, and raised it as part of the campaign, I hope that more people will take a closer look at how the Japanese decided to ignore the Geneva Convention and how the Far East war crimes trials dealt with the issue.
For me this is probably the most interesting U.S. presidential campaign in my lifetime. All three candidates have admirable qualities. (John McCain has also got good poilcies on climate change)
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, John McCain,F Force, Prisoner of War,military tribunal, torture, law, book, waterboarding, water torture, 60 Minutes, CBS,POW
Labels: A River Kwai Story, Burma Thailand Railway, CBS, climate change, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, Japan, John McCain, Singapore, torture, war crime, water torture, waterboarding, World War II
11:27 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Thursday, December 20, 2007
A River Kwai Story progress report
A brief pre-Christmas progress report on A River Kwai Story The Sonkrai Tribunal.
I spent the first couple of weeks of December going through what were once called (and perhaps still are in some ways) "the galleys." In the old days the galleys were the proofs were the long sheets of paper taken off long rows of metal ("hot") type. Later the galleys were the proofs that came out of some sort of electronic typesetting system.
These days it is Adobe's Acrobat system that is the standard, the complete book (all 6.5 megabytes) came to me by e-mail as a pdf attachment for that final check.
So it is now off to the printers (although the book won't be officially out until April, this was a good time to fit into the production schedule.
There is growing pre-publication interest in the book, with my agent looking at an offer for Asian English language rights and United Kingdom rights. Now perhaps an North American publisher will be interested as well.
I appeared live on BBC Radio Five this week (live from a CBC studio in Toronto) at 10:30 pm Toronto time, 3:30 am in the UK, for a 20-odd minute interview with Up All Night's host Rhod Sharp where we explored both the historic aspects of A River Kwai Story and the modern implications.
There is, unfortunately, no podcast of the show, and the onsite "aircheck" expired on Dec. 26.
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, Iraq,F Force, Prisoner of War,
military tribunal, law, book
10:02 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Links to this post
A brief pre-Christmas progress report on A River Kwai Story The Sonkrai Tribunal.
I spent the first couple of weeks of December going through what were once called (and perhaps still are in some ways) "the galleys." In the old days the galleys were the proofs were the long sheets of paper taken off long rows of metal ("hot") type. Later the galleys were the proofs that came out of some sort of electronic typesetting system.
These days it is Adobe's Acrobat system that is the standard, the complete book (all 6.5 megabytes) came to me by e-mail as a pdf attachment for that final check.
So it is now off to the printers (although the book won't be officially out until April, this was a good time to fit into the production schedule.
There is growing pre-publication interest in the book, with my agent looking at an offer for Asian English language rights and United Kingdom rights. Now perhaps an North American publisher will be interested as well.
I appeared live on BBC Radio Five this week (live from a CBC studio in Toronto) at 10:30 pm Toronto time, 3:30 am in the UK, for a 20-odd minute interview with Up All Night's host Rhod Sharp where we explored both the historic aspects of A River Kwai Story and the modern implications.
There is, unfortunately, no podcast of the show, and the onsite "aircheck" expired on Dec. 26.
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, Iraq,F Force, Prisoner of War,
military tribunal, law, book
Labels: A River Kwai Story, BBC, Burma Thailand Railway, CBC, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, Japan, Singapore, war crime, World War II, writing
10:02 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Friday, May 25, 2007
How Alberto Gonzales failed in history
This just posted on CBC.ca/news
Alberto Gonzales and the Geneva Convention.
Did the president's lawyer misread the Geneva Convention?
Although my book, A River Kwai Story The Sonkrai Tribunal is largely about the Second World War, it is also about the Geneva Convention and the inhuman treatment of prisoners of war.
So when I was doing my research for the book and I read a key phrase in a memo written January 25, 2002, from Gonzales to President George Bush (and leaked when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke) that said.
I was, to say the least, surprised, since almost all the Far East war crimes trials for the abuse of prisoner of war, charged or contained the phrase "inhuman treatment."
How could the counsel to the president of the United States ignore the suffering of several hundred thousand Allied prisoners of war, including thousands of American POWs?"
It may take many years of history to answer that question.
The CBC news story outlines what Gonzales should have known when he wrote that memo.
The book, of course, will tell the reader, the exact details of the "inhuman treatment" carried out by the Japanese against the men of F Force.
Technorati tags
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military tribunal, Alberto Gonzales, POW, Geneva Convention
11:45 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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This just posted on CBC.ca/news
Alberto Gonzales and the Geneva Convention.
Did the president's lawyer misread the Geneva Convention?
Did Alberto Gonzales, the embattled attorney general of the United States, turn a blind eye to legal history when he wrote a memo to President George W. Bush back in 2002 suggesting ways to avoid the Geneva Convention?
Although my book, A River Kwai Story The Sonkrai Tribunal is largely about the Second World War, it is also about the Geneva Convention and the inhuman treatment of prisoners of war.
So when I was doing my research for the book and I read a key phrase in a memo written January 25, 2002, from Gonzales to President George Bush (and leaked when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke) that said.
. . . some of the language of the GPW [Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War] is undefined (it prohibits, for example, ‘outrages against personal dignity’ and ‘inhuman treatment’) . . .
I was, to say the least, surprised, since almost all the Far East war crimes trials for the abuse of prisoner of war, charged or contained the phrase "inhuman treatment." How could the counsel to the president of the United States ignore the suffering of several hundred thousand Allied prisoners of war, including thousands of American POWs?"
It may take many years of history to answer that question.
The CBC news story outlines what Gonzales should have known when he wrote that memo.
The book, of course, will tell the reader, the exact details of the "inhuman treatment" carried out by the Japanese against the men of F Force.
Technorati tags
CBC, journalism, Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, Australia,F Force, Prisoner of War,
military tribunal, Alberto Gonzales, POW, Geneva Convention
Labels: A River Kwai Story, Alberto Gonzales, Burma Thailand Railway, CBC, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, human rights, Singapore, United States, war crime, World War II
11:45 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Saturday, September 23, 2006
The torture agreement and the missing amendment
Why do I care so much about the Geneva Conventions? Why I am constantly astounded at how the United States under the Bush administration has done everything it can to ignore those Conventions?
I can't remember, exactly, the first time I heard the term "Geneva Convention." It wasn't in university or even high school.
I know it was at the dinner table, probably before I entered Grade One, when I fought with my father over food. He would scream at a picky five-year-old to eat his food and then begin talking about the Geneva Convention.
Japan decided to ignore that first 1929 Geneva Convention. Because of that my father, a 21-year-old, white middle class Brit became a slave for three years. So did thousands of other Allied military personnel during the Second World War, who were covered by the Geneva Convention that Japan ignored. Japan also turned hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nations they occupied, Chinese, Korean, Malayan, Tamil, Filipino and Vietnamese into slaves--and they weren't covered by the 1929 Convention.
When my father was liberated from the Changi Jail prisoner of war camp in Singapore in 1945, he weighed just 83 pounds. Like most former prisoners he was obsessed with food, which made our dinner table a battleground from the time I was a toddler to when I finally left home to go university.
He suffered from untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder his entire life. There was little or no PTSD treatment for surviving FEPOWS (Far East Prisoners of War) in Allied nations until after it became an issue with Vietnam veterans. Untreated PTSD meant that he had nightmares, flashbacks, survivors' guilt and all that other baggage. He had physical ailments resulting from starvation and diseases such as berri-berri ( a vitamin B defiency) malaria, cholera and "jungle ulcers."
Unfortunately, the history of the Far East Prisoners of War has never been a priority in most of the Allied countries from the Second World War.
But one has to ask that in nation like the United States, where African American slavery has been a key issue for centuries, why so few in the United States know that thousands of mostly white Americans were slaves during the Second World War? Many have heard of the infamous Bataan Death March but few know that many of the survivors were then herded in their hundreds into "hell ships" in conditions almost equaling the infamous Middle Passage to become slave labourers in Korea and Japan. (I do have to point out, of course, that this covered a period of just three years, from 1942 to 1945, not the generations that affected African American slavery).
When the Bush administration announced, shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that they would not apply the Geneva Convention to prisoners "captured on the battlefield," I was, unfortunately, not surprised, but for me it was the first hint that the war resulting from the attacks on the United States was going to go wrong and go wrong quickly.
As I did my Masters degree in the law and history and then wrote the drafts of The Sonkrai Tribunal, and I read the documents that were either leaked or officially released, one thing became clear. The conservative civilian lawyers who drafted the policy had absolutely no knowledge of history. They read precedent and legal arguments, they did not read any of the reasons that conventions were negotiated.
That same historic perspective is missing in the current agreement on the proposed American law on the implementation of the Geneva Convention. The administration made hasty decisions after September 11 and recently faced the fact the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the country had to follow the Geneva Conventions. Faced with a revolt among even some conservative Republicans in Congress, but apparently wanting something that might pass before the November mid-term elections, the result is the agreement, which many analysts appear to be saying is vague enough that it may still allow torture, while others say it won't. That means the whole debate will once again be before the courts and before the courts for years.
Perhaps it would be best to let the proposed bill wait until the next session of the United States Congress, to give cooler heads a chance to prevail. Perhaps so that lawyers and politicians can read a little history and write laws that don't only handle the threats faced from militants of any kind in 2006, but a law that will stand the test of time.
What's missing?
The whole agreement is so full of sections and subsections that it is actually hard to give the right number, but in the last page, there is a definition of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and there it says.
The discussion of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, going back to the fall of 2001 and continuing to today has been too narrow, concentrating just on the interrogation and holding of prisoners suspected of terrorist acts. And that means, to use the old cliche, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
As I point out in The Sonkrai Tribunal, almost every Allied war crimes trial concerning prisoners of war of the Japanese after the Second World War charged them with keeping POWs in inhuman conditions and subjecting them to inhuman treatment. That ranged much farther than just the horrors of an interrogation room, but included inadequate shelter or even no shelter and exposure to the elements, inadequate food that amounted to starvation, including causing defiency diseases such as berri berri, exposure to diseases caused by an unsanitary environment such as cholera, typhoid, typhus and forced labour amounting to slavery.
I am not suggesting that anyone in the West would keep an alleged terrorist as a slave. I am emphasizing the Geneva Conventions are supposed to protect both sides in a conflict, and thus, if applied, protect our soldiers and civilians. If our soldiers or civilians are subjected to such horrors in the future, whether it is torture in an interrogation room or slavery, then there would be legal means to handle that. That's what "Western values" should stand for.
So, in my view, while that phrase on the Fifth (due process), Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment) Fourteenth (due process and equal protection) Amendments to the American constitution is needed in that agreement, it almost sounds like a script writers' boiler plate from an episode of Law and Order.
What is missing and what the long term perspective requires is the famous Thirteenth Amendment.
If someone says the Geneva Convention should not apply in the twenty-first century, ask them, "So that means you're in favour of slavery?"
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Geneva Convention,Japan,
Burma Thailand Railway, World War II, Singapore, Human Rights, constitution, law
7:18 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Why do I care so much about the Geneva Conventions? Why I am constantly astounded at how the United States under the Bush administration has done everything it can to ignore those Conventions?
I can't remember, exactly, the first time I heard the term "Geneva Convention." It wasn't in university or even high school.
I know it was at the dinner table, probably before I entered Grade One, when I fought with my father over food. He would scream at a picky five-year-old to eat his food and then begin talking about the Geneva Convention.
Japan decided to ignore that first 1929 Geneva Convention. Because of that my father, a 21-year-old, white middle class Brit became a slave for three years. So did thousands of other Allied military personnel during the Second World War, who were covered by the Geneva Convention that Japan ignored. Japan also turned hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nations they occupied, Chinese, Korean, Malayan, Tamil, Filipino and Vietnamese into slaves--and they weren't covered by the 1929 Convention.
When my father was liberated from the Changi Jail prisoner of war camp in Singapore in 1945, he weighed just 83 pounds. Like most former prisoners he was obsessed with food, which made our dinner table a battleground from the time I was a toddler to when I finally left home to go university.
He suffered from untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder his entire life. There was little or no PTSD treatment for surviving FEPOWS (Far East Prisoners of War) in Allied nations until after it became an issue with Vietnam veterans. Untreated PTSD meant that he had nightmares, flashbacks, survivors' guilt and all that other baggage. He had physical ailments resulting from starvation and diseases such as berri-berri ( a vitamin B defiency) malaria, cholera and "jungle ulcers."
Unfortunately, the history of the Far East Prisoners of War has never been a priority in most of the Allied countries from the Second World War.
But one has to ask that in nation like the United States, where African American slavery has been a key issue for centuries, why so few in the United States know that thousands of mostly white Americans were slaves during the Second World War? Many have heard of the infamous Bataan Death March but few know that many of the survivors were then herded in their hundreds into "hell ships" in conditions almost equaling the infamous Middle Passage to become slave labourers in Korea and Japan. (I do have to point out, of course, that this covered a period of just three years, from 1942 to 1945, not the generations that affected African American slavery).
When the Bush administration announced, shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that they would not apply the Geneva Convention to prisoners "captured on the battlefield," I was, unfortunately, not surprised, but for me it was the first hint that the war resulting from the attacks on the United States was going to go wrong and go wrong quickly.
As I did my Masters degree in the law and history and then wrote the drafts of The Sonkrai Tribunal, and I read the documents that were either leaked or officially released, one thing became clear. The conservative civilian lawyers who drafted the policy had absolutely no knowledge of history. They read precedent and legal arguments, they did not read any of the reasons that conventions were negotiated.
That same historic perspective is missing in the current agreement on the proposed American law on the implementation of the Geneva Convention. The administration made hasty decisions after September 11 and recently faced the fact the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the country had to follow the Geneva Conventions. Faced with a revolt among even some conservative Republicans in Congress, but apparently wanting something that might pass before the November mid-term elections, the result is the agreement, which many analysts appear to be saying is vague enough that it may still allow torture, while others say it won't. That means the whole debate will once again be before the courts and before the courts for years.
Perhaps it would be best to let the proposed bill wait until the next session of the United States Congress, to give cooler heads a chance to prevail. Perhaps so that lawyers and politicians can read a little history and write laws that don't only handle the threats faced from militants of any kind in 2006, but a law that will stand the test of time.
What's missing?
The whole agreement is so full of sections and subsections that it is actually hard to give the right number, but in the last page, there is a definition of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and there it says.
1) IN GENERAL. —No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
(2) CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT DEFINED.—
The term cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ in this subsection shall mean the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.
The discussion of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, going back to the fall of 2001 and continuing to today has been too narrow, concentrating just on the interrogation and holding of prisoners suspected of terrorist acts. And that means, to use the old cliche, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
As I point out in The Sonkrai Tribunal, almost every Allied war crimes trial concerning prisoners of war of the Japanese after the Second World War charged them with keeping POWs in inhuman conditions and subjecting them to inhuman treatment. That ranged much farther than just the horrors of an interrogation room, but included inadequate shelter or even no shelter and exposure to the elements, inadequate food that amounted to starvation, including causing defiency diseases such as berri berri, exposure to diseases caused by an unsanitary environment such as cholera, typhoid, typhus and forced labour amounting to slavery.
I am not suggesting that anyone in the West would keep an alleged terrorist as a slave. I am emphasizing the Geneva Conventions are supposed to protect both sides in a conflict, and thus, if applied, protect our soldiers and civilians. If our soldiers or civilians are subjected to such horrors in the future, whether it is torture in an interrogation room or slavery, then there would be legal means to handle that. That's what "Western values" should stand for.
So, in my view, while that phrase on the Fifth (due process), Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment) Fourteenth (due process and equal protection) Amendments to the American constitution is needed in that agreement, it almost sounds like a script writers' boiler plate from an episode of Law and Order.
What is missing and what the long term perspective requires is the famous Thirteenth Amendment.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If someone says the Geneva Convention should not apply in the twenty-first century, ask them, "So that means you're in favour of slavery?"
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Labels: A River Kwai Story, Burma Thailand Railway, Geneva Convention, Japan, Singapore, torture, United States, war crime, water torture, waterboarding, World War II
7:18 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Friday, September 22, 2006
When a Christian is tortured
Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog continues its excellent coverage of the torture issue in the United States. In one post, "Christians for Torture" on September 21, 2006, Sullivan points to the U.S based Traditional Values Coalition and its news release on September 18, threatening to hold U.S. legislators accountable if they actually do the right thing (as they may or may not be doing with the recent compromise with the White House) and refuse to allow the Bush administration to get around the Geneva Convention.
Here is an excerpt from the news release from the TVC
Let us go back to why these "postWorld War II standards" were made international law in the first place. And again, as I have earlier in this blog, I will use the Double Tenth case in Singapore as the example.
One of the civilian internees accused by the Japanese of taking part in the sabotage mission on Singapore harbour in 1943 was the Right Reverend John Leonard Wilson, Lord Archbishop of Singapore. (The Anglican bishop, Episcopalian in the United States). As I have mentioned in earlier posts [links below] the raid was actually carried out by Australian and British commandos and the civilians interned in Singapore's Changi Jail knew nothing about it. One of the tortures the Japanese use in the Double Tenth case was waterboarding. The aim was "actionable intelligence" on who blew up the ships in Singapore harbour, the method was torture and the result was a series of confessions by innocent civilians who knew nothing about the raid whatsoever.
While Bishop Wilson was not subject to "the water treatment," I am going to quote from the affidavit he swore for the Double Tenth trial. (warning this part may disturb some readers)
At that time, the 1929 Geneva Convention only covered military personnel who were prisoners of war, and the Japanese disregarded that. It was torture cases like the Double Tenth that led to the post war Geneva Convention that covers civilians, and it is that the Bush administration apparently is trying to find a way around.
Earlier posts on the Double Tenth case
The classified blog that got it right on water torture.
Waterboarding is a war crime
(I am still studying the compromise and what experts are saying. I will post my views soon.)
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11:43 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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Links to this post
Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog continues its excellent coverage of the torture issue in the United States. In one post, "Christians for Torture" on September 21, 2006, Sullivan points to the U.S based Traditional Values Coalition and its news release on September 18, threatening to hold U.S. legislators accountable if they actually do the right thing (as they may or may not be doing with the recent compromise with the White House) and refuse to allow the Bush administration to get around the Geneva Convention.
Here is an excerpt from the news release from the TVC
TVC Chairman Rev. Louis P. Sheldon said American military and intelligence experts are hampered by a vague "outrages upon personal dignity" statement in Article Three of the Geneva Convention of 1950.
"We need to clarify this policy for treating detainees," said Rev. Sheldon. "As it stands right now, the military and intelligence experts interrogating these terrorists are in much greater danger than the terrorists. Civil suits against our military personnel are tying their hands as they try to get vital information which will save the lives of our young military people and the innocent."
"Our rules for interrogation need to catch-up with this awful new form of war that is being fought against all of us and the us and the free world. The post-World War II standards do not apply to this new war."
Let us go back to why these "postWorld War II standards" were made international law in the first place. And again, as I have earlier in this blog, I will use the Double Tenth case in Singapore as the example.
One of the civilian internees accused by the Japanese of taking part in the sabotage mission on Singapore harbour in 1943 was the Right Reverend John Leonard Wilson, Lord Archbishop of Singapore. (The Anglican bishop, Episcopalian in the United States). As I have mentioned in earlier posts [links below] the raid was actually carried out by Australian and British commandos and the civilians interned in Singapore's Changi Jail knew nothing about it. One of the tortures the Japanese use in the Double Tenth case was waterboarding. The aim was "actionable intelligence" on who blew up the ships in Singapore harbour, the method was torture and the result was a series of confessions by innocent civilians who knew nothing about the raid whatsoever.
While Bishop Wilson was not subject to "the water treatment," I am going to quote from the affidavit he swore for the Double Tenth trial. (warning this part may disturb some readers)
On arrival at Japanese Military Police Headquarters on 17th October 1943, I was placed in a cell with approximately fifteen others under conditions set out in the report [a joint report on prison conditions submitted by internees after the war-RR]. On the same night I was taken to another room for investigation and received beatings on the shoulder with a rope. On the following day (18th October) I was made to kneel with a sharp-edged piece of metal behind my knees. My hands were tied behind my back and I was roped under the knee-hole of a desk in a very painful position. Japanese soldiers stamped upon my thighs and twisted the metal behind my knees so that it cut into the flesh. I remained in this position for nine to ten hours, sometimes being interrogated, other times being left under two Japanese guards who kicked me back into position whenenver I moved to try and get release. I was then carried back to my cell, my legs being too weak to support me.
On the following day (19th October) I was again carried upstairs and tied face downwards on a table and flogged with ropes, receiving more than 200 strokes from six guards and the chief investigator, working in relays. I was carried back to the cell and remained semi-conscious for three days and unable to stand for me than three weeks....
After this long investigations took place with threats of torture and death, but no more torture took place until February 1944 and then only for half an hour. I received medical attention and dressing for wounds for more than two months. This was given by the Japanese doctor and dressed at the Military Headquarters....
I also saw many cases of brutality by the Japanese guards inflicted upon their prisoners. In one particular case, which occurred about the beginning of November 1943, I saw Dr. Stanley, who was in the cell next to mine, at the Japanese military police headquarters being repeatedly taken to and returned from the investigation room. When he was away I could hear his voice crying out in agony denying the charges made against him. Sometimes he was carried on a chair and sometimes on a stretcher but the torture continued over a period of at least two weeks. One day he returned semiconscious. A Japanese doctor was called and he was taken away on a stretcher and never returned to the cell. I was told by a Japanese interpreter that he had died.... His death was undoubtedly due to the maltreatment he received. I saw people getting thinner and thinner as a result of their ordeal and lack of food and some of them were returned to Sime Road Camp [another prison camp in Singapore-RR] either dead or dying.
At that time, the 1929 Geneva Convention only covered military personnel who were prisoners of war, and the Japanese disregarded that. It was torture cases like the Double Tenth that led to the post war Geneva Convention that covers civilians, and it is that the Bush administration apparently is trying to find a way around.
Earlier posts on the Double Tenth case
The classified blog that got it right on water torture.
Waterboarding is a war crime
(I am still studying the compromise and what experts are saying. I will post my views soon.)
Technorati tags
torture, Geneva Convention,
Christian, Andrew Sullivan,water boarding,
Japan, World War II, Singapore, Human Rights, war crimes, traditional values,
Anglican Church
Labels: Andrew Sullivan, Geneva Convention, human rights, Japan, Singapore, torture, war crime, water torture, waterboarding
11:43 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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